1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to disk recovery systems, and more particularly, to a method and apparatus for automatically restoring a failed disk drive on a live client computer.
2. Description of the Related Art
Modern computer networks generally comprise a plurality of user computers (referred to herein as client computers or clients) connected to one another and to a computer server via a communication network. To provide redundancy and high availability of the information in applications that are executed upon the computer server, multiple computer servers may be arranged in a cluster of nodes forming a server cluster. Such server clusters are available under the trademark VERITAS CLUSTER SERVER from Veritas Software Corporation at Mountain View, Calif. In a server cluster, a plurality of servers communicate with one another to facilitate failover redundancy such that when software or hardware, i.e., computer resources, become inoperative on one server, another server can quickly execute the same software that was running on the inoperative server substantially without interruption. As such, user services that are supported by a server cluster would not be substantially impacted by inoperative server or software. To facilitate high availability and redundancy, the server cluster contains backup servers for redundantly storing data from the various servers within a server cluster. In addition to integrating aspects of failover redundancy into their respective network environments, many businesses also implement additional measures designed to efficiently restore hardware and software system components in the event of a failure.
Currently, there are several applications that are capable of restoring a plurality of files in the event of a disk drive failure. These applications can simply replace the corrupted or lost files by accessing duplicate copies of the original files and subsequently restoring them to a restructured disk drive. As a precaution, these duplicate copies are typically stored on a backup storage device. Similarly, there are applications that have the capability of restoring an entire machine or system. Notably, these applications record the state of the machine's configuration (e.g., TCP/IP configuration), which is to be used as a backup. However, these types of applications require the machine or system to be booted into a recovery-mode in order for the application to successfully implement the restoration process.
Although these backup/restoration applications exist, there are no applications in the industry that allow for the restoration of a single disk drive of a live client computer. In the event a non-system disk drive should fail, a user is typically forced to invest a considerable amount of time and effort attempting to determine the disk structure. This initial step is critical and must be accomplished before any data can be restored to a new disk drive. Since most conventional backup processes do not normally replicate the disk structure, a significant amount of the user's efforts will involve the determination of the disk's original configuration. After ascertaining the layout of the failed disk drive, the user is then further inconvenienced by having to manually rebuild the disk structure on the new disk drive before any data can be restored to the new disk drive.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for a method and apparatus that automatically restores a failed disk drive on a live client computer, including both disk structure and data.